Judges allow medical euthanasia

Judges allow euthanasia in exceptional cases

05/04/2012

The verdict of the Berlin administrative court causes excitement: Berlin physicians may therefore in exceptional cases leave incurably ill patients with substances for suicide. The State Medical Association had forbidden this to a doctor in 2007. However, according to the judges, a general ban infringes freedom of conscience and freedom to practice one's profession.

Judgment is only valid for plaintiff and Landesärztekammer Berlin
Doctors should not generally be banned by the Doctors' Council to let deadly substances be suicide for patients for whom there are no longer any chances of recovery, according to the ruling of the Administrative Court of Berlin. However, assisted euthanasia is still prohibited for healthy and mentally ill people.

In the current case, a doctor, who was the second chairman of the association Dignitas Germany at the time of the lawsuit, had filed a lawsuit against a ban on the Landesärztekammer Berlin in 2007. In the former judgment, the medical association referred to the „medical ethics“ and forbade the doctor not only the specific euthanasia through assisted suicide but also „Substances which, alone or in combination with others, are capable of causing the death of a person, of being delivered to patients or otherwise leaving to use for their intended suicide“. An infringement of this prohibition would have resulted in a penalty payment of € 50,000.

Professional and organized euthanasia still prohibited
However, the judges considered the general ban to be a violation of freedom of conscience and freedom to practice. The doctor could get into a conscience conflict in exceptional cases. The press release of the Administrative Court states: „Measured on the constitutional scale of the freedom of practice (Article 12 of the Basic Law) and the freedom of conscience of the physician (Article 2 (1) of the Basic Law), however, no unqualified prohibition of medically assisted suicide should have been granted. It is incompatible with the abovementioned fundamental rights to prohibit the medical assistance to suicide even in exceptional cases, under penalty of a penalty, in which a doctor would get into a conscience conflict due to a long-lasting, close personal relationship, because the person responsible for the suicide Desire, unbearable and irreversible suffering from an illness and alternative means of limiting the suffering would not be sufficiently available. The applicant has stated that such an exceptional case does not constitute a merely theoretical possibility for him outside of his employment with the assisted consent organization.“ The judges insisted that the healthy and the mentally ill were exempt from giving lethal drugs. Beyond that it is medical associations „just like that“ allowed to prohibit professional or organized euthanasia, such as offered by the association Dignitas. (Ag)

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Every third doctor is open to euthanasia
Ex-Justice Senator Kusch founds euthanasia e.V.

Picture credits: D. Braun